Flutter/DART: First Impression

All of sudden, I had a chance to briefly review Flutter. Covering all desktop, mobile, web in single programming language, and for web, compiled to Javascript instead of WebAssembly which takes a forever-log real time compilation time - isn't it lovely and beautiful? (Oh, Qt has WebAssembly port, but it takes forever to compile the code, which may be because of that big fat core library).

Someone said that the biggest weakness of Flutter is DART, but I don't agree. The structure of DART is quite interesting, and considering the accessibility from other programming languages it is both understandable(I'm looking at you, Rust). The only thing I dislike is that darn garbage collector, but I think I should admit if DART doesn't want to manually control pointers in any way. Or, if they force RAII in whatever way everyone will be angry. :P

I think, the biggest drawback of Flutter is state management. For other frameworks you don't have to distinguish stateful against stateless widgets, but in Flutter you must do it verbosely. What's more, if build() is called it automatically finds only changes and applies only found changes. For someone the word "automatic" will say "yeah so it's Google!". But as a C++ developer myself, I throw a question like "why do you compare everything when you can recognize changed area?" For me, it looks like that the Flutter developers designed to change everything, yet distinguishing stateful widgets against stateless ones to minimize overhead to GC(the garbage collector). I think, for me, the property binding of Qt is better than this.

I'm afraid the approach of Google in this way would drop the readability of the code. If you read Introduction to widgets, one of the official documentation for Flutter, you see "the separation of responsibility allows greater complexity to be encapsulated in the individual widgets, while maintaining simplicity in the parent". For me, it sounds like a warning to prepare for the hellish burning(......) hell, when you have to change the stateless widget. What if you have to separate some part of stateless to stateful side? And there's no absolute way to prevent you from doing it. Most of the people select Python or Javascript because they provide very flexible development environment for requirements changed in real time, but I think, for Flutter that kind of flexibility would be a bit hard.

I'm not sure about others' opinions, but for me DART is okay but I'm a bit against Flutter. It's like...... it forces specific development process and design concepts. Do I really have to do it this way? I'm not sure.